Dominica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 72

ized kind of rape in the high woods. It is considered an indignity for the men to carry anything on their
heads, in the manner of their women and the Negroes. They carry their loads lashed on to a shelf which
is supported at the sides by ovals of basketwork, the whole being slung on their backs in the fashion of a
haversack. Their little society is still a tangle of feuds and jealousies, and they frequently resort to their
own sorcerers, who practise a survival of their aboriginal magic known as 'piai.' Belief in dreams and
their interpretation plays a great part in their lives. One of their strangest customs is that of adopting a
pseudonym, which they rigorously maintain whenever they undertake a long journey, so that all actions
or gestures during their absences are considered to have been done by an unknown stranger. Death and
burial are accompanied by elaborate wakes and fumigations which are often the occasion of celebrations
and dancing and the swallowing of enormous quantities of rum, for the pleasures of drink are still as im-
portant to them as ever they were in the past. [6] When legally obtained supplies are too dear, shebeens
are sometimes secretly erected.
Indifference to money, inaptitude or scorn for trade, and a total lack of ambition render them, for many
of their fellow-islanders, a perplexing community. They have a marked distrust and contempt for laws
and taxations imposed from without. Their purpose is to keep their own way of life in the woods and on
the sea unchanged, and with the minimum of interference from outside: a wish that seems, in spite of
their many grumbles, to be fairly liberally indulged. Their food is mainly fish, and often, still, crabs, and,
above all, cassava, yam and dasheen. They fish in the rivers at night by torchlight, and catch crayfish with
cassava bait. Fish are also killed by poisoning the mountain streams with larouma , a vegetable whose
venom is innocuous to humans. Lobsters are captured by divers, and elaborate wicker pots are woven to
entice and imprison turtles. Iguanas, which are one of their great delicacies, are hunted with a technique
as strange as their ancient mode of parrot-catching. The hunter steals under the leafy haunt of one of these
reptiles, and whistles to it gently for hours, until it is hypnotized into a sort of æsthetic trance. The little
prehistoric dragon is gently lassoed, and then, bound hand and foot, carried joyfully home. They cultivate
vegetable gardens in the high woods, which they clear by felling the trees and burning the bush. When
they have exhausted the soil they move on and repeat the same process elsewhere. (This is also a favour-
ite practice of the country Negroes, and one which, in such a mountainous terrain threatens much of the
island with serious soil erosion.) Little parties of them, laden with their garden produce and with Carib
baskets for sale, climb the footpaths over the watersheds and ravines to the market in Roseau.
Many of them were hacking with adzes and cutlasses at the insides of canoes. When a Carib intends
to make one of these gommiers , he chooses a tall dacryoda hexandra in the high woods and fells it at the
time of the new moon. The shape is roughed out where it lies, and the centre excavated. The maker then
summons his friends, and the hull is dragged to the rhythm of special songs down to the foot-hills with
ropes made of liana. There, under a tree near his hut, he trusses the ends and splays it open by filling it
with water and then stones, and finally expands it amidships over a slow fire, keeping the sides wide, like
an alligator's mouth, with sticks. The inside of the hull is ribbed and cross braces are inserted. The sides
of the craft are heightened with planks which converge at one end in a high blade; the seams in the planks
are caulked, and when its two masts and a mizzen and lugsail have been prepared, the vessel is ready for
launching.
Travel by sea is still a passion among the Caribs; for trade, for smuggling, and sometimes purely for
fun. They have been known to sail their canoes far beyond their little archipelago, sometimes as far as
Cuba, the Guianas, and the Spanish Main. They have cronies in all the neighbouring islands, and fre-
quently they return from their expeditions in a condition of ancestral tipsiness, harmlessly capsizing sev-